Wednesday, March 13, 2013

When you go out for a special meal, are you tempted to photograph those plates of food that have been lovingly prepared by an expert chef? If you do, then the memory of that culinary treat will last long after your taste buds have been cleansed.

Unfortunately some restaurants will not allow you to take photos for whatever reason. In fussy establishments, in New York for example, they ban photography at the table.

In Alicante things are different though. There, the Grupo Gourmet are even running a course to teach people how to get the best shots of their food. The course is aimed at beginners and starts with the advice to make sure your camera lens is clean. The next piece of advice is to use only natural light. Flash at close distance produces some horrible shadows and disturbs other people in the restaurant. If the light isn’t quite right, you are advised to use something like a shiny menu card to direct it or even your iPad to cast even light on the food. Finally avoid using zoom; instead move yourself closer to the food.

Once you have your photos, you can then process them using free software to create different effects. Instagram is a popular way to add old fashioned effects. However, there are other pieces of software like Google’s Snapseed or Big Lens for Android which mimics the out of focus backgrounds that you get with larger format DSLRs. Personally, I’d rather leave my photos as they are and maybe just tweak the colour to get rid of that tungsten orange colour. Brightening up a few highlights and a touch of sharpening and the job is done for me.

If you have shot each course of the meal, then PicFrame will allow you to put them together into a collage to post online or send to friends.